Driftland - The Magic Revival (text version)

Good mornin-afternoo-vening, dear readers and welcome to Driftland: The Magic Revival, a fantasy-set real-time-with-pause 4X which casts you in the role of a powerful mage capable of shaping the game map with the simplest moves of your hand and a couple of shifts of your finger. Not only that, but it is the only game - as far as I know - in which buildings appearing seemingly out of nowhere not only makes sense from a game-world perspective, but the mechanics behind it is crucial to the overall gameplay experience. But before I dive in deeper into how Driftland works, please keep in mind to subscribe and click that bell notification button, it really helps.

Driftland: The Magic Revival sets you up as a Mage Overlord, starting with a small Castle on one of the many floating land masses that make up your world now. The planet wasn’t always made up of floating islands, however at some point in the distant past, a massive magical war erupted almost destroying the planet. The survivors, seeing that they would almost surely be destroyed if they continue, pooled their remaining magic to save what was left of the planet. And that’s the situation you have now, a world made up of floating islands instead of massive land masses or bodies of water. Magic had been on the down-low for many ages after that massive last spell was cast but recently magic returned to the world and with it, magic-users.

You are one such magic-user.

And this gives you the unique abilities required to create a more cohesive kingdom out of the various scattered islands strewn around the map. So now that I set up the game story enough for whatever I go on to say to make sense, let’s start with the graphics and music.

Graphics and sound

Driftland: The Magic Revival looks and moves extremely good. And that’s something that’s that much more important to stress when you consider that this is in fact, an indie effort.

It takes the realistic yet representative approach to how buildings look. Meaning that the overall art design is a realistic one however, due to the several and cool island-centric mechanics, the buildings you’ll be making are more a representation of what the buildings are supposed to be, they’re large enough to look good and make some sense in terms of gameplay, but they’re not really proportionate with what the territories the islands are supposed to represent, or indeed with the individual units that you can create and who will work for you.

Sound and musicwise, the game’s equally solid. Nothing really noteworthy in terms of music just to say that it’s a very fantasy-appropriate soundtrack and it doesn’t get repetitive or annoying after several hours of play, and this is a 4X, so several hours of play are not only suggested, they’re kinda required for maximum enjoyment.

Tutorial

This is one of those games that really needs a tutorial. Not that there are games that can do without one - but Driftland has some very thematic mechanics that one has to understand properly in order to master their use, these are things you won’t really find in Civilization or Stellaris.

So the tutorial does a great job at taking you through the basics of kingdom construction and citizen management but also shows you the basics of what your magic can do, in terms of the floating islands.

Thanks to your magic you can see through the fog of war, which you’ll need in order to place a portal gate on a new island. These are called Gates of Tyrr and they’re great especially at the start of the game because it allows you to explore a large number of islands from afar. Exploration is a major part of the game, at least in the beginning and throughout the mid-game because you’ll not only find caches of random resources on various islands - which can be a great boon at the start of a game - but they are also where you’ll find the resources you’ll need to further expand. Amongst other things. Once you’ve decided a particular island is worth investing further into - you can then use your magical powers to physically move the island closer to your already inhabited ones and connect them via bridges.

The connection via the Gates of Tyrr are only temporary and they do cost mana, so they’re not a very efficient long-term connection method, that’s what bridges are for. Keep in mind that your islands need to be connected to each other - either via portals or bridges - in order for you to reap the benefits of whatever resource producing buildings you have on the islands.

Gameplay mechanics

The tutorial also introduces you to the idea that while you are this almost all-powerful mage, capable of building things with just a couple of clicks and the power to move land-masses at your will, the units you create are not your puppets, as such you have to incentivise them with money rewards in order for them to do things, such as exploration, geological surveys or attacking enemies. You can do all of those things using Gates of Tyrr, initially, and the geological survey is crucial because you won’t see all of the resources that an island has to offer as soon as you clear the fog of war. You’ll only see the amount of basic resources - namely wood and stone - you can produce from it. However, there are several other things which you’ll need, in order to develop your kingdom, that have to be surveyed for. Only once you know all the resources an island has to offer, can you make a properly informed decision as to whether or not said island is worth you spending the resources to magic the thing close to you and connect with a bridge. Because once you connect an island to your main kingdom, even if you don’t build anything on it, your building upkeep cost will go up. Mo’ land mo’ taxes, I guess.

Mo’ people mo’ taxes for sure though, and here’s where the main balancing act in terms of resources happens.

Resource management

The fundamental resources that the game is build on are your population number, food and gold.

The more people you have, the more gold they generate by paying taxes, the more food they’ll require. You can generate food with your particular food producing building - because each of the four races has its own thing - and sending some of the people to work. Problem is, all the citizens who produce any sort of resource - be it food, stone, rubies, mana what have you, don’t also pay taxes. Which means you need to constantly, and I mean constantly, keep an eye on your food and gold production, and expand your population steadily but carefully so that you don’t get in a situation where you either run out of food because too many extra people need to eat all of a sudden, or you empty your treasury because you’ve been building too many houses all of a sudden and the population isn’t going up fast enough to put you in the black.

Speed settings/active pause

Now, Driftland could just have easily been a very combat-focused RTS if it weren’t for the rather challenging resource management that has to be done and the fact that it has several speed settings. A great and quite crucial feature to any 4X or city-builder, Driftland has a bunch of faster speeds that one can use while waiting for a particular building to finish magic-ing itself up, or gathering some resources to do something with them. Equally as important is the active pause feature which has this great little effect when you push the button. The graphics get a bit blurry and there’s a slow-down sound effect accompanied by a change in music pitch. It’s a nice little touch that makes using the feature a bit less mundane of a thing.

Even though we’re dealing with a 3D environment, which allows you to zoom in and out quite a bit. In fact, you can zoom out till you only see the map as well, a map, but there is no camera rotation in the game. This might be added later but I have to say that it’s not really a minus for the game, considering how weird and abstract the connected islands get to become, I think being able to rotate the camera as well would make it a bit too confusing.

Combat

Despite you not being able to directly order your units, they will automatically attack enemies when any part of your kingdom is attacked. You will need to incentivise them with a reward for exploration or attacking when you wish to begin an assault.

Combat is mostly automatic since there’s not a lot of strategy to be had considering the mechanics of the game, but the devz make up for this by giving you power to directly attack your enemies. Every race in the game, has access to a direct damage spell, a damage-over-time spell, a freezing spell, an area of effect spell and a massive spell that damages both units and structures in a large area of effect. They all do more or less the same thing but with a different thematic flavor depending on the race you’re playing.

Also, considering the fact that everything happens either on or across floating islands, flying units will be the main means of attacking and defending. Interesting thing is that none of the races can actually generate flying units. Instead, you’ll have to explore the map and find nests which generate a limited number of flying mounts, which your combat units can then get onto and fly into battle with. These mounts are really expensive and usually the nests will only generate one or two, with the option of increasing that number by one if you invest your progress points into that a particular feature called Extensive Breeding.

Progress points

Progress points are similar to the Lore points in Northgard. You generate them by exploration, vanquishing your enemies and assigning workers to a House of Scholars. Then you can use them to improve one of three major aspects of your race. Magic, warfare or economy. Any of the options offered on these various paths offering you some permanent passive buffs to either your economy, combat units or spells. You might be prone to forgetting about these points however you’ll discover that they can be quite useful even if the benefit they offer isn’t that large to begin with. Keep in mind that most, if not all of them, apply to a larger number of either buildings or units, and as such, really add up in the end. One of my favorite ones to start with is Finance Reform because it lowers building upkeep, thus taking a bit of the pressure off your Treasury and allowing you to continue growing.

Spell

So I’ve touched upon the decent number of spells that you have at your disposal throughout the review. I mentioned your sight and portaling spells and the combat ones, but there is a separate category of spells that only has to do with the floating islands. These spells can be used exclusively upon the islands. The most commonly used one will be the first spell that allows you to move islands around. As I said earlier, to bring a resource-rich island closer to your inhabited ones, or push a small or resource-poor island away because it doesn’t benefit you occupying the space. But there are a few more island-based spells that you have access to and these tend to come in use towards the mid- to late-game, when you have a lot of mana stored up.

The second spell will allow you to terraform an island into a biome appropriate for your race. See, each race has its own particular type of island that it can thrive on. You can only build your food producing structures on appropriate islands, otherwise they won’t work. Similarly, resource producing buildings will only work at half-capacity if they’re set on an island that does not match your race’s biome. So terraforming resource-rich islands is a thing that becomes quite important later in the game. Keep in mind though, that you can’t cast this on your own, you’ll need at least one spellcasting unit active in order for it to happen. But once it does, the animation and visual effect is quite wonderful to watch.

Then the third spell allows you to literally summon an island into existence. The island will match your race’s biome and will have randomly generated resources and the last spell allows you to completely destroy islands. This one is an incredibly costly spell but it is a great way of assuring that an enemy doesn’t get a foothold back on an island which you’ve already razed to the ground.

On the other hand, there’s a cheaper way of doing that, and this is one very cool combat option possible only in this game.

You can simply steal an enemy’s islands, if you manage to destroy the bridges connecting it to the other islands, and then casting the first spell to move it away from his influence and then connect it to your floating island archipelago.

Then there’s another separate category of spells which will be completely unique to each reach of the races and I’ll not get into those as well, just rest assured, there’s lots of ways of doing things in the game when it comes to magic.

Conclusion

Now, the game is still in Early Access and it might still be there for awhile. The developers are working on adding the fourth and final race to game as well as adding a bunch of other features such as multiplayer and campaigns for each of the races.

And the game is extremely playable as is, so if you’re into everything I’ve described up until now - you should get in on the Early Access as soon as possible because the game will only get that much bigger and better as time goes on.

And that wraps it up for what I hope was an informative look at Driftland: The Magic Revival. Thank you for watching, be kind subscribe and seeya next time.

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